Nobody’s There: The Signs of Our Abandonment.

The signs are everywhere: we’ve been abandoned. Wherever people stand in relation to Brexit, the environment, business, education or immigration they seem to feel as if nobody cares about them. It’s confusing because on the face of it we have surely never been more cared about. Don’t most of the signs we see tell us that? There are more signs than there have ever been and the majority of them spread ‘caring’ messages. I’m looking at one now as I travel on an underground train from St Pancras. It reminds me to carry a bottle of water when I travel, and I’m traveling and I have a bottle of water; so why, I wonder, does it leave me feeling hopeless and irritated?

I ask my friend traveling with me what she thinks. She tells me nobody gives a fuck. We stare at the sign in silence. ‘You’d think,’ she says after a few moments, ‘we’d be grateful’. You might, but the effect of the sign in front of us reminds me of how my cat looks when I pick up her bowl to clean it rather than fill it with food. Disappointment. Abandonment. I share this with my friend who reminds me that my cat is greedy. ‘Perhaps we are as well,’ she says, ‘greedy for some proper attention.’

As the journey proceeds we find ourselves thinking about other signs that induce a similar effect. A series of signs appeared outside a library near where we live, warning drivers to go slow, to wait at a certain place, not to turn in a certain direction and also to stop (presumably before driving into the post the sign is mounted on). There are temporary signs in the High Street, all over it, directing drivers to avoid a hole being dug, the people repairing the hole, traffic coming in the opposite direction which had priority because of the hole – and of course there were the barriers, painted red and arranged around the hole which didn’t explicitly say anything but formed a part of the general aura of extreme caution. These had, however, been blown into the hole by the high winds the previous night. It was midday by the time I saw them, but nobody had resurrected them, and nobody was working on the hole, and the traffic was in chaos.

What else? My friend thinks of an arrow pointing towards ‘Disabled Access’ to a civic building, across a horribly uneven pavement, and of a sign often seen in cafés: pickpockets operate in this area. We think of signs asking people to switch off their car ignitions while waiting at a level crossing, or to share their cars on long journeys to work, or to not drop litter, or announcing the benefits of ‘considerate’ constructors. My friend gets off at Great Portland Street, her spirits sunken, leaving me to dwell on these things not quite on my own, thankfully with a lingering sense of her presence.

None of the signs we had thought of seemed to be doing much apart from stating the obvious. They didn’t appear or feel helpful. They seemed to generate a feeling as if someone or something wasn’t there: a person keeping an eye on things; a safer or more helpful way of doing things. Each seemed to suggest a duty discharged or a concern abandoned. A prelude to a sneak-fine or a piece of work nobody we knew would want (although we did think that a lot of people we wouldn’t want to know might). Whatever you might think would be most important to the person reading the sign – genuine help – wasn’t there.
We might assume that signs like these are there to communicate something: that they are simply saying what a person might if they were physically there to speak, and that they are there for us to read and act on. Fair enough: that might also happen. But what seemed most noticeable to my friend and I was the signs’ peculiarly alienating effect. It was as if they had their own agency and could somehow speak for themselves, whispering: get lost.

This effect extends to what we really do hear. Voice recordings at railway stations apologise for late-running trains. ‘We are sorry …’. To be sorry requires a specific intention, a degree of particular care, an agreement to be sorry on a distinct occasion, to an identifiable person or group of people, and for a certain thing. No, these messages are not really about that kind of communication. In them, in the way that they are delivered, as they become known to us, we are excluded from anything to do with discussing a delayed or abandoned journey. Of course we feel angry when we hear these messages. Something in us cleaves to the truth whatever we are told, when we are lied to. These signs, these messages which I am taking as signs, they gaslight us. They appear to point towards an apology and a caring organisation when there is no such thing.

You could telephone a bank, if you wanted more of the same. Santander, for example, offers the message: ‘I’m sorry but we’re busy helping other customers.’ Who is? Sorry stands for something contrary to what it says, another mysterious signposting effect: in some way it will make someone pleased. The problem of keeping a customer on the line may have been solved. A job has been done. Hoorah.
We could go further and look at other signs, maybe signs that we might not at first think of as signs, and register their effect. Photographs of burning Amazonian rain forest? There is abandonment here. Poor farm workers and their families. Are we forgetting about the South American poor? Are we stripping them out of our thinking when we express horror at Bolsanaro and the damage to the environment, or somehow leaving them allied to Bolsanaro?

What about young people when we see reports of knife crime? How do these stories of danger, disorder and disrespect affect the idea of youth (at a time when most young people would certainly not vote for Brexit, and when one of the most vocal protesters concerning climate change isn’t yet 18 years old)?
All of these signs somehow abandon us. They abandon along the lines I have suggested and they abandon us to distraction: the distraction of looking for someone to blame. Bolsanaro, Trump, Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Farage. What happens when we see these names, as we frequently do? Or when we see their images?

I often take flight into psychology. Aren’t these men narcissists? Isn’t narcissism about control and abandonment? It often is, but I’m afraid that aetiology, insight, they don’t do anyone any good unless they occur to the narcissists themselves. Speculation, commentary: they don’t do much. Satire, political commentary, Twitter-outrage and exhaustive theorising appear, if we think of the men I mention here, to have led us nowhere. Each attack becomes a digression. It becomes separated from the good intentions of its author and serves the original tide of abandonment.

Distraction helps us avoid something we’re incapable of thinking about properly. Rather than feel fear we plunge into fantasies of knowing what to do and maybe we feel, for a while a little better. Psychology, semiotics, politics, they offer a sense of control and the illusion of power. For a while things don’t feel so frightening.

But maybe in recognising this we are getting closer to the heart of a problem. I mentioned earlier that the signs seem to have their own agency. What happens if we stop thinking of them as signs? There may well be conspiracies and cabals at work but what if these are also at the mercy of the effects I have mentioned? Particular effects signed in the present like a pen signing a signature on a cheque: like the mark of Zorro. What if these signs are things in themselves that don’t point anywhere but actually do something in the way, for example, that I am now typing?

At this point I will make an unusual move for someone writing about a problem and throw my arms up in despair. I do not know what is going on. I have drawn attention to the abandoning effects of some things that I began by calling signs, and proceeded to suggest other things in the world that seemed to have a similar effect, as if they were signs. I’ve taken us to think about abandonment and connected it with what happens in the face of fear. We might disconnect, dissociate, distract or settle into abject dismay, some of the manoeuvres that accompany abandonment.

I’m not a help, really, in adding any certainty to what is causing what I have described, although it wouldn’t take a genius to think of at least two sources of great fear: Brexit and climate change, or to find ways in which they may be related.

Perhaps I can offer something of a remedy to the pain of abandonment. Let’s call it ‘presence’ even though philosophy would suggest that absolute presence is impossible. If we call it presence we can imagine something that might work in difference rather than in relation to abandonment. Maybe it might offer some resistance.

As a psychotherapist I have seen how being alone or with uncaring people has a very different effect to being with people who care, especially in times of crisis. So what would I suggest as a cure to feeling horrified, angry, abandoned day on day? There is no cure but, alongside feeling these things it might still be possible to feel other emotions, depending on how one behaves. These other things can feel even more profound set against abandonment, like a light against a dark sky.

I would suggest abandoning or limiting the time you spend in places where the kinds of sign I have mentioned, or whatever we want to call them, lurk. These places can be characterised quite simply. They prohibit physical contact and limit the ways in which all of our senses might experience somebody else. Smell, in particular. If you are in touch with someone and you cannot smell them, even if you believe there is nothing to smell, you must plan to change that; or at least recognise that it is in these ways, almost undetectable ones, that we can ease our sense of abandonment. We can know someone properly. I wonder what Boris Johnson smells like might be a far more fruitful question than how does he behave towards his girlfriend.

Maybe these thoughts seem a little woolly and eccentric? There is a danger, one connected to the problems I have tried to discuss here, in trying to work things out on one’s own. Perhaps if I offer you some things that have been suggested to me by other people matters will become clearer. And this in itself, asking other people for their ideas (steering clear of words like ‘feedback’ which relate, if we think about it, to improving the functioning of machines) is a very good thing to do. I will suggest three things.
Number one, don’t type your thoughts, expecting them to be read on a screen. Find someone to say them to so you know at least one person has heard you from the look on their face and the way that they breathe. They won’t have to do anything else to convince you that you are not alone.

Number two, notice politicians who avoid questions, who try to close things down (like parliament), who avoid unpredictable events where they might be held to account or asked to take responsibility, and never vote for them. But do vote and protest for real: remember that it will not be forgotten how Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson became covered in milkshake. Think about what happened when Extinction Rebellion occupied important public areas of London.

Number three, go and watch a film like Almodovar’s Pain & Glory. This is not only a film about love, it is a loving film. The director loves his cast, his locations, his words, his images and of course his audience. Abandonment plays no part. Few films are like this. Track them down.

If you only do these three things I can guarantee the world will feel a better place, and you will feel better within it. You may find yourself making better decisions and doing things that suit you more. The problems we face are extremely complex, the answers impossible to know, but life does not have to be dictated by a feeling that nobody’s there.

Tom Tomaszewski

tbt.therapy@gmail.com